Plasma-enhanced processing, such as plasma-enhanced etching and plasma-enhanced deposition, has long been employed to process substrates (e.g., silicon wafers, flat panels) into electronic products (such as integrated circuits or flat panel displays or liquid crystal displays). The processing of a substrate using plasma-enhanced techniques is highly complicated and tends to involve highly skilled personnel operating complex plasma equipments. The complexity of plasma-enhanced processing may be somewhat alleviated using software applications that can control, monitor, analyze, and/or respond to events that occur in the plasma processing chamber.
However, due to the complexity of modern, high-device-density plasma processing, techniques, a large amount of data and a highly complex array of software applications are typically involved in the plasma processing of a given batch of substrates. For example, different software applications may be employed to control the wafer movement, to start/stop the plasma, to generate a specific type of plasma from a specific recipe, to control the various knobs to effect processing in accordance with a given recipe, to monitor the health of the chamber, to analyze throughput, to generate alarms, etc.
As plasma processing requirements evolve toward the production of ever-shrinking devices, even the most skilled human operator can become overwhelmed with the vast arrays of ever-changing software applications involved in the operation and maintenance of a complex multi-chamber plasma processing cluster. This is partly because each of these software applications may provide a large set of features or capabilities that are accessible and/or capable of being productively utilized only after extensive training and exposure to the features/capabilities of that specific software application.
Further, even if one were to master one specific software application, the features and capabilities of a different software application that is also necessary for the plasma processing of substrates may involve the use of different user interface look/feel or navigation steps, a different way of presenting data, a different way for the human operator to acquire the data needed for a given operation, etc. Since the human operator must learn the unique user interface navigation or look/feel of each individual plasma-processing-related software (PPRS) application and must get familiarized with the different data acquisition steps of each PPRS application, extensive training is typically required before a human operator can become productive with the requisite suite of software applications necessary to efficiently operate a modern plasma processing machine.
On an ongoing basis, if the feature set or the capabilities of any given software application in the suite change due to, for example, a version update, the human operator may be required to re-learn the new user interface and/or data acquisition steps for that updated software application. For some human operators, the complexity becomes overwhelming and there is no motivation to learn a new PPRS application or to delve deeper into existing PPRS applications than absolutely necessary to perform the minimum required to produce substrates. As a result, the complexity of present PPRS applications prevents the human operator from realizing the full potential of the rich feature set provided with each of the PPRS applications.